And while we’re on the subject of links, here are a couple more a friend recently sent me that help highlight another important thing we all need to keep in mind if, as I’m guessing, the BDS noise level gets higher over the coming months due to the recent Gaza explosion.

First, remember Sabra – the US hummus manufacturer that the boycotters have made the subject of their ire due to a complex guilt-by-association formula known only to them? Well, here’s an interesting news piece that indicates the impact the global, unstoppable, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement” is having on that company:

Now I suppose that without the boycotters at their heels, Sabra might be on 86% of the country’s supermarket shelves by now. Or (a more likely scenario), no one shopping at those supermarkets gives a fig about what a tiny bunch of fanatics has to say about what they get to buy and why.

Moving onto a boycott target that at least operates out of Israel (vs. New Jersey), SodaStream has been increasingly serving the role of BDS bogeyman. So is this maker of fine seltzer-related products and flavors quaking in their boots, or choosing to remain inconspicuous or anonymous in order to avoid being attacked for whatever the BDSers are attacking Israeli companies for these days?

OK, so if one boycott target is on its way to hitting every store shelf in the country, and another is proudly declaring its arrival in the US market via the most watched TV event on the planet, what about the company that has been on the receiving end of BDS attacks the longest: Caterpillar Tractor (maker of KillDozers products like this one)?

After all, close to a dozen years of divestment calls must be having some impact on that company’s stock price (keeping in mind that the only way divestment can actually impact a corporation is by making the company so controversial that buyers sell their shares in fright, driving down share value).

Well, if the graph below is any indication, Caterpillar (which has bounced between quadruple and quintuple its 2001 share value over the last couple of years) is about the only thing doing better than the Israeli economy as a whole (which merely doubled in size during the BDS decade):

I bring these facts up not to encourage complacency, but to provide some perspective. For even if we have to deal with a dozen or several dozen student council votes, hummus boycotts or (heaven forbid) celebrity tour cancellations over the next several months, let’s not lose sight of how meager BDS ambitions have become, or of the fact that their pathetic attempts to persuade opinion have failed for the same reasons Sabra and Soda Stream and Caterpillar and Israeli have thrived: because we are right, they are wrong, and the public they are so desperate to convince is onto them.

Same here. Btw, BDSers can’t travel via Amtrak either, since the cafe cars on their intercity and long-distance trains stock Sabra. The Empire Builder leg of a trip from Portland, OR to Newark, NJ in November 2011 was actually the first time I had theirs. In honor of BDS, of course.